Off Topic: Cultural Appropriation and Dance

Ira Stoll is angry about a NYT interview with an Israeli modern dance choreographer.

Israelis stole folk dancing from the Palestinian Arabs in an act of “cultural appropriation,” The New York Times claims.

I think that he is over-reacting. In response (without referring to his piece), I wrote,

it was the most liberal-minded Jews who enjoyed Israeli dances that incorporated steps modeled on Arab debkas. Some of the choreographers had come from Arab countries and were proud of their heritage. Others wanted to promote their idealistic vision, which was for an ethnically and culturally integrated state, with Arabs blended seamlessly into the economy and life of Israel. In hindsight, this vision may seem naive , but it was well intended.

8 thoughts on “Off Topic: Cultural Appropriation and Dance

  1. Everyone who is outraged by “cultural appropriation” and who is neither Chinese nor of Chinese descent should stop wearing pants immediately – pants were invented in China.

  2. This outrage is counter-productive because the we find historical cultural mix has been around since the beginning of time and it is not surprising that Arab/Jewish dancing is close because they lived in the same area for centuries.

    And the biggest modern global music is American Rock ‘n Roll which 80% was created by mixing Southern white and African-American cultures in the 1950s with Elvis Presley, Fats Dominio, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis etc. (Throw in some street vocal singing with traditional American pop music in as well.)

    • “American Rock ‘n Roll”

      Unfortunately, the whole idea of a bass line pattern with the melody in the treble was largely used in the classical baroque era. So, I guess if you’re not German you’d better be into Jazz…

      No, wait. That doesn’t work. I’ve got it. Ragtime!

      No, wait.

      Humming atonally to yourself? Probably not.

      Understanding that the really great thing about music is how it can blend and change over time? Dear Lord, anything but that!

  3. The only way to stop “cultural appropriation” is to prevent interaction between cultures.
    More walls, anyone?

  4. sometimes “cultural appropriation” can be so crassly executed that I understand why some people would be peeved.
    But 95+% of the “cultural appropriation” claims I see are just as dumb as any miscegenation argument, and usually wrong for the same types of reasons.

    It is also strange for me to see Progressives being so (little “c”) conservative. Those Progressives would never agree with the descriptions, but just barely tweak barbarism-civilization axis into philistine-civilization axis, and it will overlap a lot with oppressor-oppressed.

  5. Moses “stole” the law from Hammurabi so this thing has been going on a long time, I guess.

    I’ve been listening to Japanese hip hop lately so…my bad.

  6. I’d be interested in your take as to whether the cultural appropriation stuff fits into the Three Languages of Politics framework.

    I haven’t come across any libertarians who take the concept seriously or think it’s anything other than decadent identity politics masquerading as an implication of social justice principles that is really a load of incoherent nonsense. That’s consistent with libertarian principles.

    But conservatives have precisely the same attitude, and don’t align at all with the progressives one this one but using a language of ‘cultural preservation and integrity’ or something like that, trying to keep out even superficial or culinary aspects of barbarous folkways lest they undermine the pattern of our existing civilization. (One saw something more like these arguments 80+ years ago, so perhaps it’s just too late now, but even then I don’t think conservatives would have objected to adding some foreign fare to a cafeteria menu a mere option.)

    Yes, the crazy progressives who takes such claims seriously (as if they really are sins instead of positive actions) are quite selecting in deploying them in a matter consistent with their oppressor-oppressed holy-victimology hierarchy, but they do not insist in their rhetoric that the principle itself is only applicable when those ‘problematic’ status relationships are present.

    Consider two of my favorite examples of cultural appropriation, both from the age-of-exploration Portuguese.

    Tempura: The Portuguese ate fried, battered fish on certain Catholic fast days on which the meat of land animals was to be avoided. The Japanese began to embrace Western wet battering and took word for time in “times of [fasting]” – “tempora” as the name for the culinary practice.

    Vindaloo: Paglia’s favorite “Indian” dish, was also brought by the Portuguese to Goa as “carne de vinha d’alhos” (“meat marinated in wine with garlic”.)

    If you ask the progressives who is allowed to complain to whom when these appropriations are put on the cafeteria menu (or, say, about the Japanese bagel shop I used to go to), you get a lot of dizzy sputtering.

    It may be that ‘cultural appropriation’ is just a fancied-up facade and ‘way of picking fights’ to enable more banal oppressed-oppressor dynamics in which questions of who to support in any fight, even when they are embarrassingly stupid fights, are answered according to the membership in favored groups.

    But progressive rhetoric seems to want to present cultural appropriation as a more generic principle applicable in theory to everyone.

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